Speaker: Mustafa Akan ( Carnegie Mellon University)
Title: Naor Revisited: Two-Sided Queues with Strategic Agents
Date: 12 February 2026, Thursday
Time: 17:30-18:30
This is an online seminar. To request event details please send a message to department.
Abstract: We study a two-sided observable queue where strategic agents arrive on each side according to a Poisson process, seeking to match. Agents decide to join or balk by weighing their matching reward against their expected delay cost until matching. This setting generalizes the seminal one-sided queueing model of Naor (1969) while fundamentally changing the incentive structure: each agent creates both a negative same-side externality and a positive opposite-side externality. We establish the following main results on the equilibrium joining thresholds and performance under self-optimization, social welfare optimization, and profit maximization. (1) These regimes balance the thresholds on both sides in contrasting ways. The self-optimizing thresholds ignore the opposite side’s reward and delay cost. The socially optimal thresholds imply that each side’s probability of immediate matching is proportional to its delay cost, a newsvendor-like solution. In stark contrast, profit-maximization yields a one-sided queue. (2) Self-optimization may lead to inefficient underjoining, not only on one side, but also in aggregate, yielding lower throughput than socially optimal. However, social optimization may harm the welfare of one side, compared to self-optimization, pointing to efficiency-equity trade-offs. (3) Social optimization can be implemented via side-specific prices that may require a subsidy on one side, yet guarantee non-negative revenue. (4) The Price of Anarchy (ratio of optimal welfare to self-optimizing welfare) is unbounded and highly sensitive to arrival-rate asymmetries. (5) Profit maximization yields lower throughput than socially optimal, yet the Price of Profit (ratio of optimal welfare to profit-maximizing welfare) is bounded by a factor of 2.
Bio: Mustafa Akan is an associate professor of operations management at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University. He graduated from Bilkent University in 2004 with a B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in managerial economics and strategy at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. His thesis received the Best Dissertation Award from the Aviation Applications Section of INFORMS. He is the co-recipient of the INFORMS Best Paper Award of the Service Science Section, POMS Healthcare Best Paper awards, the Lave-Weil Prize, and the Gerald Thompson Teaching Award. Dr. Akan received the NSF CAREER Award in 2014.
He has been a courtesy faculty member at the Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh and the Heinz College of Public Policy at CMU. He is a board member for the Service Science Society and an associate editor for Operations Research. The domain of problems he examines include revenue management, mechanism design, service pricing, organ transplantation, physician over-testing, and child adoption.